While you should not expect any great revelations at a talk by Bruce, going is definitely worthwhile in my experience. At the very least it makes it even easier to trust the things he writes afterwards. He comes over as very genuine. (Of course, he might still be along-term NSA plant ;-)

The company he mentions is called E T in Delaware, founded by a researcher in massively parallel computing Guang Gao. I found a CV for him that specifically mentions federal grants from the NSA, which I assume went to his university.

The company appears to be doing things with the 160-core Cyclops64. I wonder whether this is the sort of technology that is needed for brute force breaking of encryption?

Do you have any plans to come to New York City? I would have to see one of your on-site presentations. I am working on a information security framework for start-ups, first to second round funded organizations, and incubators.

You know what I miss? I miss the not-so-old days, when Bruce's website was full of discussions of all the daily world puzzles and issues, and analytics about the interesting problems we faced.
Before we knew how bad it was, before the NSA revelations that seem to have destroyed so much joy and hope and expectation.

I want to hear what Bruce and you all think of the crap data that is coming out about the Malaysian plane missing. One thing I don't get is why there is no discussion of whether any of the passengers were using onboard wifi or connecting to the world during that flight, was there even wifi on that flight? Nobody seems to know.
And now, I just think to myself "what a hell of a nice break for the NSA that story is". "Malaysian missing airline gives NSA some much needed shadow".

But since the NSA revelations are so earth shattering and so significant to all of us, one of the stories I have been waiting for and do expect to eventually see is that of the NSA manipulating and mucking with an innocent individual for their own entertainment. Young (or old) IT guys in a super secret agency, blah blah blah, hard to believe there isn't some evidence of them doing grotesque psych torture on innocent civilians. I'll buy you lunch if this isn't the case.

Most regretfully I will be unable to attend any of the events--I'm too busy trying to restructure my small company from a unmitigated disaster--it's not a aircraft related issue. Time that I used to have to myself is now dedicated to re-organizing, arranging, addressing, and responding to the lawless (as well immoral and unethical) behavior of the various TLA's that will make slaves of us all.

Congress has been passing spending (appropriations) bills with funny language in it lately, including background check's every five years--for any job that has some federal funding connection. Odd that the period of time is "five years"--uh, me thinks something odd (and prime) is a foot (not meter).

"Bruce, how much variation is there in these talks? I'm in a position to catch multiple of them if you'll be talking, say, NSA in one, cyberwar in another, reliability of hardware RNGs in a third, ..."

There's a lot of overlap, of course. I can't produce that much new material. Often the event's webpage gives the talk title and description.